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A Hydrogen-Based Economy
Glog writes "Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of Wired magazine have written an amazing article explaining why we need to transition to a hydrogen economy. Lots of info there, estimated cost and benefit ... very good solid reasoning for whatever floats your boat - national security, environment, super-duper-charged automobiles."
I'm sure that Bush and everyone who actually matters will read this and say "Good golly this is a great idea! We should do it right away, oil companies be damned!"
I'm not cynical.
The hydrogen economy needs trillions of dollars in investment to get it going. This won't happen in our "returns-in-six-months-or-else" system we have at present, beacuse it is more cost-effective in the short term to do what we're doing right now. When the global energy system becomes dire - which it WILL, eventually, and sooner than you think - the hydrogen economy will take off, because if it doesn't the human race is quite literally doomed.
But it's not doomed for more than six months. The accountants won't let the investment happen. It's not too late... yet.
-Mark
While eventually we probably will move to a hydrogen based economy, there is a flaw here. Currently and in the foreseeable future, extracting the vast amounts of hydrogen that we'll need requires...wait for it...hydrocarbon based fuels like oil and coal! That's right, in order to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water, we need energy. How do we produce most of our energy? Hydrocarbons.
Increased nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal power generating capacity would help solve this problem of course. However, it will be a long, long time before we can wean ourselves off of hydrocarbon based fuel sources.
Help me, I'm confuzzled!
This post is prezactly on-topic! Honest!
(okay, stop ignoring now
A hydrogen-based economy would be awesome! If we could generate all our power from water ... we'd have an almost infinite supply! woo!
Except for that nasty using-up-all-the-oxygen thing ... ah well. I'm sure we can adapt. Nitrogen works, right? :)
It seems like it would be difficult to carry around little canisters of hydrogen to pay for everything.
I don't get it.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
My, now famous, Hydrogen Powered Jeep totally rocks! It is so nice to see the rest of the world catching up with me for a change!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
This is all well and good, but why can't we promote hybrid cars in the meantime? I for one was pissed when I found out the Bush Administration was ending the programs for hyrbrid cars and shifting the money to hydrogen cars that won't be around for at least 10 years.
How much you wanna bet the funding for those end just before we get to the point where they might be useful, so that we can persue the next big thing in energy efficiency (all the while sticking with the crappy methods we use now)?
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Photons + Water -> Hydrogen & Oxygen -> Water.
These guys who use solar power in their homes, and sell the surplus to the power company, could also use the surplus to create hydogen fuel for their cars. That's self-sufficiency.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Here are some criticisms of the Hydrogen Economy...
9
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=1523
The Hindenburg "got flamed" because it was painted with Aluminum Powder (Rocket Fuel for close friends) in order to reflect some sunlight.
The burn begun whem a spark (thanks to static electricity) crossed one canvas to another, igniting the Aluminun.
Yeah, and pee every 10 minutes when driving from NY to LA, therefore taking 3 weeks to make the trip. ;-)
Unfortunatly like many hydrogen fans, they're ignoring the realities of the world. For example, under the creation of hydrogen, they're suggesting that you should use electrolosis of water to produce it, because steam reformation of methane releases CO2. No-one does electrolosis for a reason, it's horribly inefficent. You then have to deal with moving a dangerous and hard to deal with molecule around, which is going to reduce the efficency even more, and then what do they do at the end? Use it in a fuel cell to produce electricity! If you've got electricity produced by any method and want to make best use of it, then KEEP it as electricity. Using it to make hydrogen is just throwing it away.
Conspicuously missing from the article, where the hydrogen comes from.
We dont know how to make hydrogen a commercially viable alternative. As soon as it's profitable, it'll take off in a big way.
It's the simplest element, it's everywhere in the universe, we'd never run out of it, but we dont know how to get it without putting more energy into the extraction than we would get from it as a fuel.
Why not just write an article on how a pixie-dust based economy is the wave of the future? Or another one about rocket cars and living in giant plastic bubbles under the ocean?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Hey, to all those who may either have kids or maybe you're a big kid yourself. I saw a cool science kit over at Frys that has a small refillable fuel cell used to run a little car included in the kit so you can have some fun learning about these guys. The fuel cell housing/wall itself is see-thru. It was $30 at the one here in Dallas. Not too bad. Might make a nice gift for the geek in your life.
well, ya know, cars are already powered by explosions.
The Hindenberg just had a big Hydrogen balloon that wasn't being depleted - it was simply "there". In the case of a hydrogen-powered car, the hydrogen supply would be steadily depleted in a semi-closed system with little to no chance of a huge pocket igniting. For the exact same reason that, under standard usage, gas tanks and fuel lines don't explode.
This does not account for Pintos and Volkswagens, of course.
Hydrogen + fuel cell is just hoped to be either better for storage of electricity than batteries, or cleaner than hydrocarbons (still has to be converted somewhere, generating pollution and CO2), eventually. That's all, until we can use the planet as a Bussard collector.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
"Peter Schwartz s a partner in the Monitor Group and chair of Global Business Network... [and] a former futurist for Shell Oil"
h tml,
I think I better trust the motives and analysis of the MIT folks. http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article1205.
Salon has an article that is more realistic - or cynical, as the case may be.
Switching over to Hydrogen definitely changes oil politics... the Middle East would ease back into irrelevancy, and the US could start ignoring them again like Osama bin Laden wants. But do you think those countries will be happy once we've pulled their major revenue source out from under them? They haven't been able to use their oil wealth to make any other significant industries in their countries.
I seriously doubt switching from oil to hydrogen will stop terrorist attacks.
Okay, maybe I missed something here, and I'm certainly no physics major, but from what I understand, hydrogen is created through the process of electrolysis, where it an oxygen are seperated from water. Also, from what I understand, this is a fairly energy-intensive process.
:-)
So, the question is, where are we going to get the energy to create the hydrogen? From... oil burning electricity generating plants? That would kind of defeat the purpose of switching to hydrogen for our cars, wouldn't it? In fact, it would require more electricity to generate the hyrdogen, which would in require more oil! And if folks say, "build more nuclear plants for electricity generation", I'm sure that's going to go over really well with the environmentalists in California. They'll just love that idea.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hydrogen powered cars, but it seems like we're playing a shell game here, moving the oil from the cars to the electricity generation.
(If my assumptions about generation of hydrogen are wrong, someone please correct me!)
car talk
"A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy,
which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With
a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome
obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first
car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and
pollution-free." President Bush said these words during his State of the Union
address, introducing the FreedomFUEL proposal--which is really how the White
House spells it. The president wants to spend $1.2 billion over the next five
years to research the production of hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline in
automobiles.
Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell"
motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants,
including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of
hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the
world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a
hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked
Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by
something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.
The attraction of hydrogen is great, since hydrogen-based transportation
would both be environmentally benign and reduce the need for the United States
to import petroleum. But Bush's proposal joins a new convention of
rhapsodizing about hydrogen-powered transportation--Jeremy Rifkin numbers
among current hydrogen zealots--while skipping over the small matter of where
we get the hydrogen. Worse, the White House plan offers a long-term
distraction from a short-term need: While the administration dreams big about
our hydrogen-powered future, it does little to improve fuel-economy standards
today.
here are many impediments to a future in which fuel-cell automobiles
dominate America's roadways. What form--gaseous, liquid, or mixed with
metallic dust to prevent explosion should there be an accident--would the
hydrogen we pump into our cars take? How would the hydrogen be moved in
commercial quantities to those filling stations? Could average motorists pump
hydrogen themselves, considering it is now handled only by specialists? But
these are engineering questions and presumably can be answered.
Unfortunately, a cost-effective answer to the question of how to obtain
hydrogen may prove more elusive than answers to questions about how to handle
it. At first glance, this issue would seem simple. After all, our world
contains gargantuan amounts of hydrogen--two-thirds of the oceans, for
instance, are made up of this element. But the pure form of hydrogen needed to
power fuel-cell cars does not occur naturally on Earth, where hydrogen is
chemically bound to other elements, such as oxygen in the case of the oceans.
And, while the stars contain an almost inexpressible amount of hydrogen in its
pure form, stellar material will not be on sale at your local filling station
anytime soon, or ever.
Because pure hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, any pure hydrogen
for use as fuel must be manufactured. Today, pure hydrogen is most often made
using natural gas as a feedstock, but that means fossil fuels are still being
consumed: Basically, the process turns a fossil fuel, methane, into something
that seems not to be a fossil fuel, hydrogen. Pure hydrogen can also be
manufactured using petroleum or coal, which of course are the very fossil
fuels whose grip we wish to loosen. And, while pure hydrogen has been
manufactured from agricultural products--plants contain hydrogen bound as
carbohydrates--at the research level, it remains to be seen whether this could
work commercially. Enviros rhapsodize about making hydrogen from seawater. But
there's a catch: Making hydrogen from water requires loads of
electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that
is obtained, and something--be it a coal-fired power plant or an atomic
reactor--must provide the electricity. Indeed, the big misconception about
hydrogen is that it is a "source" of energy. Pure hydrogen is not an energy
source, except to stars. As it will be used in cars or to power homes and
offices, hydrogen--like a battery--is an energy medium, a way to store
power that has been obtained in some other way. Hydrogen makes an attractive
energy medium because its "fuel-cycle" calculations--the sum of all steps of
manufacture and use--show reductions in greenhouse gases compared with any
automotive fuel burned today. But hydrogen is going to be an expensive energy
medium and, in the early decades at least, will be a medium either for natural
gas, a fossil fuel, or for atomic power.
Today, the most practical means to make pure hydrogen is a process called
"steam reforming" of natural gas. A natural-gas molecule has one atom of
carbon and four atoms of hydrogen; "reforming" strips off the carbon atoms,
leaving pure hydrogen. But not only is a fossil fuel--natural gas--the raw
material of this process, energy must be expended for the "reforming" itself,
meaning a net loss of BTUs. Using Department of Energy estimates, the White
House says pure hydrogen from natural gas is currently "four times as
expensive to produce as gasoline."
Applied engineering and commercial-scale production would surely bring
down the price. The most optimistic credible projection I have seen comes from
Jesse Ausubel, a specialist in "industrial ecology" at the Rockefeller
University, who thinks commercial-scale hydrogen made from natural gas could
be produced for about 40 percent more than the price of gasoline. That's
within striking distance of a good deal. But there is a catch to this catch:
Optimistic estimates for hydrogen from natural gas are based on the current
low selling price of natural gas. Significant new demand for natural gas might
raise its price. And, while natural-gas supplies are steady at the moment, who
knows what the effect on supply would be if hydrogen manufacturing caused
natural-gas consumption to skyrocket?
So maybe the hydrogen should be made from coal or petroleum. Fuel-cycle
calculations show that using coal or petroleum to manufacture hydrogen would
lead to some reduction in greenhouse gases but not to a big cut; moreover,
we'd still be digging coal and importing petroleum. Maybe hydrogen should be
made from agricultural products-- "biomass," in energy lingo. But biomass
feedstocks might be grown using fertilizer, which is made mainly from fossil
fuels, and again the fuel-cycle calculations show only a moderate gain in
pollution reduction for the large capital costs entailed in establishing an
agriculture-hydrogen economy. (All hydrogen schemes, it should be noted,
involve large capital costs.) Owing to these concerns, John McCarthy, a
Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science, has written, "The
large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar
electricity." Otherwise, it's just repackaging fossil fuels.
But solar power on the scale required is far from practical. It is
possible to imagine a green-dream-come-true energy cycle that uses solar
collectors to generate electricity to crack hydrogen out of water: zero
greenhouse gases and endlessly renewable. For the moment, solar collectors are
much too expensive. The Worldwatch Institute, a much-admired, left-leaning
environmental organization, recently rated sources of electricity by combining
their capital cost and true social cost--that is, taking into account
"externalities" such as pollution and entanglements with the Gulf states.
Solar power finished last, much more expensive than coal-generated
power, even when coal's external costs are factored in. An indicator:
Solar-derived electricity currently wholesales for around ten times as much
per kilowatt-hour as coal-fired watts.
Even if the price of solar power fell by orders of magnitude, there would
be the not-so-little problem of where to put the solar collectors. To replace
the petroleum we use to power our cars with hydrogen split from water might
entail doubling America's electricity-generating capacity. Doing that with
solar collectors could require covering a land area roughly the size of
Connecticut with photovoltaic cells. In theory, the collectors could be put in
space, where sunlight has eight times as many watts per square meter as on the
ground and where no one's land need be taken. Figures in a recent study in
Science magazine suggested that doubling the electricity-production
capacity of the United States would require placing approximately 40
photovoltaic collector dishes, each the size of Manhattan, into orbit. Even if
capital cost were no object and society possessed the technical means to build
objects in space the size of Manhattan, such a project would take a century.
hich brings us to atomic power, the energy source everyone loves to
hate. In theory, lots of new atomic stations could be built to make
electricity to manufacture hydrogen, and the stations could use new,
"inherently safe" reactors designed so that they cannot melt down. (In
inherently safe reactors, the atomic chain reaction is initiated in such a way
that, if safety systems fail, the chain breaks; researchers have deliberately
turned off all cooling and safety systems of inherently safe prototypes and
nothing happens.) But political opposition to atomic reactors is intense, and
capital costs here would be high as well. Some estimates also suggest that, if
a significant number of new reactors were put into service, uranium--currently
plentiful--would become scarce after a few decades. This could be avoided by
building "breeder" reactors that make more fuel than they consume. But
breeders work by breeding plutonium, and most nations, including the United
States, have suspended construction of breeder reactors because such machines
would increase the risk of plutonium being diverted for nuclear weapons
production.
Many researchers continue to believe that "fusion" reactors, which mimic
the internal process of the sun, someday will be perfected. Over the long
term, fusion reactors might solve all global-energy questions, oddly, by using
hydrogen to make hydrogen! In a fusion reactor, tiny amounts of hydrogen
isotope are fused into helium, generating heat. (The sun fuses hydrogen into
helium for its luminescence, and nuclear bombs get much of their force from
fusing a small amount of hydrogen isotope.) Heat from a fusion reactor would
drive turbines to make electricity; the electricity would crack hydrogen out
of water in large quantities; the hydrogen would power cars or be turned back
into electricity in individual fuel cells in people's homes. Though a
hydrogen-to-hydrogen energy cycle might sound like a perpetual-motion machine,
it could end up being the technology that someday makes global-energy needs a
solved issue.
But this is all blue sky because fusion reactors barely function in the
laboratory--there is nothing remotely close to a commercial prototype. And,
even if a grad student ran from a laboratory tomorrow yelling, "Eureka!" and
clutching the secret of an unlimited-energy-fusion future, it would be another
century-long project to convert the world to an energy economy based on
machines that simulate the centers of stars.
Realistically, these concerns dictate that, for the next few decades,
hydrogen would be manufactured either from natural gas or by using power from
a new generation of atomic reactors. The most cost-effective combination, some
researchers think, might be natural gas heated directly by atomic reactors,
whose high operating temperatures turn out to be ideal for the reforming of
hydrogen from natural gas. But that means our miracle zero-emission hydrogen
will be produced from fossil fuels via an intermediate stop at a nuclear
reactor--not exactly what the Sierra Club had in mind.
All these drawbacks do not rule out hydrogen as a fuel, they merely
represent problems to be overcome. Hydrogen is sure to enter common use
someday, perhaps during the lifetimes of children now being born. After all, a
century ago, smart engineers and economists would have sworn it physically
impossible--to say nothing of impossibly expensive--for the world to consume
75 million barrels of oil per day, as we do today, at affordable prices. But
there is almost no chance hydrogen will make a dent in energy-use patterns
during a two-term Bush administration. Even the White House concedes that the
earliest a significant number of service stations could offer pure hydrogen
would be 2020.
-- john
In my sporadic but sometimes intense investigations of alternate energy sources, I was always the most taken with hydrogen.
It is very clean. It is relatively efficient. I'd prefer a liquid fuel, but then again, I'd prefer a non-volatile, non-toxic fuel, too. You can't always get what you want.
The attractive things about hydrogen are its real abundance. There are so many interesting possibilties for how to make it. I saw a fascinating series of papers (curse me for not being able to find the original links - although you can get familiar with the ideas with some simple google searches, i.e. this conference poster) on the use of genetically engineered bacteria that produce hydrogen when eating various things, even waste products.
"Electric" has massive drawbacks both in storage and distribution, which are both dirty and highly inefficient. Methanol/Ethanol are probably even dirtier, though potentially renewable, but there are questions about how sustainable, for instance, corn power really is. Geothermal and hydro are obviously limited in place and abundance... Solar, wind and tides are ideal but unpredictable and expensive. I'm excited to hear about big improvements in solar power systems, but the big stuff (70%+ efficiencies) still seem a ways away for commercial use.
To me, that leaves good old hydrogen (in combustion? in a fuel cell?) - attractive both for its unparalleled cleanliness and the interesting potential sources. Why not?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
When reading the article, one part in particular jumped out at me:
Is the Prius really a radically different automobile from the view of the consumer? It has the same sort of range as a traditional car, and you still have to fuel it up like other cars. The only radical differences I can see are its gas mileage (which is not always what it's cracked up to be) and the higher cost of repairs. I'm hesitant to extrapolate from its acceptance to the acceptance of a car that runs on entirely different fuel, and requires a now-nonexistent fuel infrastructure.
300 dollars please.
You dont just throw 100 billion dollars around and expect for all of the rules of physics and chemistry that make extracting hydrogen a wasteful process go away.
Hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy source. The best we can hope for is that it's better than batteries, but the hydrogen needs to be made.
Oh, and before the fuel celled cars show up, we need to come up with something to replace plastics and styrofoams, as thats where most of the produced oil ends up.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think this is a good idea, but I don't really think it'll happen. First of all, as most posts have already mentioned, there's no way the oil companies will allow this to happen; they have too much at stake to want to change the way things work.
Secondly, and maybe more importantly, is public perception of these types of vehicles. I know just about nothing about the workings of hydrogen-powered cars, which lumps me in with (I'd wager) over 95% of the rest of the country. When people like me hear the term 'alternative-energy automobiles,' we think 'expensive and underpowered.' And what does the average consumer look for in a vehicle? A low price and lots of horsepower.
I'm not saying that hydrogen-powered (or solar-powered or whatever) vehicles are incapable of costing little or being able to tow your boat; I'm just claiming that the average American thinks along those lines, and as long as this perception exists then there will be no demand for alternative-fuel cars.
What I think we need is a huge marketing campaign which essentially hammers people over the head, and beats into them the advantages of hydrogen power. There are economic advantages, environmental advantages, and even simply the coolness that can come from owning something the neighbors don't. It could even be explained that their views of hydrogen-fuelled vechicles are wrong, and that they really can have the horsepower and cost in addition to an environmentally-friendly car. A huge marketing blitz could be undertaken relatively cheaply and have the effect of greatly boosting demand, which in turn would cause corporations to invest capital and make this actually happen. That, along with tax credits or some sort of incentive program, would generate demand with consumers and put the whole alternative-fuel concept on the right path.
the coolest club on
Here's a link, it has some other intresting information aboutt the program. http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/actransit/ beck_feature.html
Humm? There are not huge H2 deposits in the earth to tap. Electrolysis of H2O is hugely inefficient. You could take the light hydrocarbons and steam crack them to form H2 and C02, but this does not reduce our dependance on foreign oil!
Sheesh, it would be nice if these guys would pull their heads out of their butts and have a logical though for once. But wait, if that happened then their heads might explode.
Kent
The hydrogen economy has lately gotten lots of press, but much of it mistates role that hydrogen can play.
Hydrogen will not, can not, be a primary energy source for our society. Current hydrocarbons provide net energy (at least in a temporal sense) because the energy that was consumed in their creation was used millenia ago. There are no similar, vast reserves of hydrogen waiting to be exploited.
While other posters here (and many others in varied other media) talk of a supply of hydrogen gained from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, they have forgotten that this process requires energy, thus necessitating some other primary energy source. Some suggest that source may be solar or wind or hydro--but then they are the actual source of the energy, hydrogen is merely an intermediate storage device.
It is much more likely that any 'hydrogen economy' that emerges in the next 3-4 decades will be based upon the extraction of hydrogen from methane, either at a large scale, or in fuel cells at the point of generation.
I'm not saying that hydrogen has no place or not interesting, but in our excitement, let's not forget the law of conservation of energy.
--my $0.02
Unless the economy turns around, all I'll be able to afford is a hydrogen-petrol Yugo
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
When the global energy system becomes dire - which it WILL, eventually, and sooner than you think - the hydrogen economy will take off, because if it doesn't the human race is quite literally doomed.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it ironic that on the same page as this "How Hydrogen can Save America" article, there's a GIANT FUCKING AD FOR AN SUV
I think it's the human race's nature to destroy itself, hydrogen tech or no hydrogen tech.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Hydrogen powered cars?
Dream on!
Let me break down the 5 areas that they say need R&D. I accept that these are the main problem areas. However, consider the alternative, of methanol powered fuel cells.
1. Solve the hydrogen fuel-tank problem.
However you do it, it's more difficult than storing gasoline. With methanol, it's eactly the same problem. Bush should devote $0 to this problem, and instead point to the current solutions for oil.
2. Encourage mass production of fuel cell vehicles.
This one is the same for methanol fuel cell vehicles. But wait! With methonal, the internal combustion engine is also a viable alternative. It's less efficent than a petrol IC engine, at current standard, but that's migigatable (I think petrol IC will probably slightly excel methanol IC). So, you can get methanol into vehicles sooner, meaning the total cost is spread over a longer time. The dual engine technology will assist adoption.
Additionally, methonal fuel cells, all solid state, are working in lab prototypes. This is about the same state as hydrogen fuel cells, so you'd not lose anything by going to methanol over hydrogen, and you'd gain a lot.
3. Convert the nation's fueling infrastructure to hydrogen.
Easier with methanol - it's the same type of problem as gasoline, so use the same type of solution - no real R&D needed here. That's a significant win over hydrogen, and equal with gasoline. The problem of supplying dual fuels is the same w.r.t. hydrogen or methanol.
4. Ramp up hydrogen production.
Methanol is more difficult to manufacture than hydrogen. But... there are two options. The first one, diret chemical synthesis from CO and H2 is very slightly more complex than direct hydrogen production. The other option, ferment it from celulose. All the waste wood / straw can be fermented into methanol. I don't know which would be cheaper - but I do know that it's not possible for one man to manufacture hydrogen on his ranch. A methanol still, on the other hand, is perfectly feasable. Spin that correctly, and there's capital there.
On the whole, however, it's 50/50 methanol / hydrogen.
5. Mount a public campaign to sell the hydrogen economy.
Hindenberg. Doesn't matter what actually happened, the helium industry spun it so well, that it's embeded in peoples minds that hydrogen is unsafe.
Methanol is methylated sprits. I don't think anyone thinks that's more dangerous than gasoline.
So, slight win for methanol, on the safty front.
Overall, I make that two noticable wins for methanol, two slight advantages, and one where it's 50/50.
Postscript: I use methanol, rather than ethanol because ethanol fuel cells are noticalby more difficult (== expensive), and producing methonal from biomass uses wood and other indigestable matter. Generating ethanol requires sugars, i.e. food.
But the myth of the hydrogen economy is confounding to me. For example, take the claim that "hydrogen is plentiful" made by Mr. Schwartz. Yes, it's a plentiful element, bound in low energy configurations in other molecules. There are no hydrogen "free lunches" sitting out there waiting for us to take advantage of them. The problem is that most of the sources of hydrogen take more energy to get hydrogen from than they provide in energy output from burning the hydrogen (or reacting it in a fuel cell). This is fundamental chemistry and physics. No ranting and raving or spending campaign is going to change it.
The "hydrogen economy" really needs to be relabeled as the "coal economy" or the "nuclear economy", because hydrogen's role in this hypothesized economy is merely as a very efficient battery.
The most viable alternative energy sources we have right now are right under our noses but we've chosen not to see them. Ethanol can be produced quite efficiently at reasonable cost from renewable sources. Low cost cellulose-containing feedstocks are available that don't end up with the energy-sinkhole problems faced by corn-based ethanol (i.e. you end up putting more energy into making it than you get out of it). The tools of biocommodity engineering are starting to mature, and this is where we need to put more resources.
Ethanol and methanol, in fact, can be used to power fuels fairly efficiently (not quite as much so as hydrogen). But we don't have to wait - FFVs (Flexible Fuel Vehicles) are on the market today, thanks to tax incentives. People need to be made aware of this alternative. The problem? Outside of the midwest and corn based ethanol, it's hard to fuel up on fuel grade ethanol at the pump. More investment in building production facilities and developing distribution channels to the pump is needed for the several million FFVs already on the road, and a government-financed consumer awareness campaign would also go a long way to supporting this effort.
Other real possibilities exist too - biodiesel, for one, though the economics of it are likewise not as favorable as for ethanol production.
We don't need to enslave ourselves to oil. But we do need to be realistic about the alternatives and acknowledge that hydrogen is merely part of the equation. We shouldn't use "hydrogen" as shorthand to refer to the broad array of _real_ alternative energy solutions that are available. The myths about hydrogen need to debunked - it doesn't make you anti-progress or pro-oil to point out the realities of a full "lifecycle analysis" (to use the term from the biocommodity engineering literature) of hydrogen production and usage. And to divert vast volumes of money to research hydrogen when that's not necessarily the most viable path to a sustainable energy economy seems at best foolish.
Converting a 2-ton gasoline guzzling SUV into a 2-ton hydrogen guzzling SUV doesn't actually save you anything.
You don't find hydrogen lying around in the same way you find oil. Instead, you usually get hydrogen by adding energy to water. (In this respect, hydrogen acts as a carrier for the energy.) But the energy still has to come from somewhere; and the way our economy is currently rigged, that means burning oil.
There are opportunities for savings: you can insist that any plant which burns oil to make hydrogen must re-capture the carbon; that will have an impact on greenhouse gasses, and it is easier to build/maintain/police that equipment than similar equipment built into every automobile, but it also means that the price of hydrogen will be raised by that much.
But there will also be costs: think for a moment the cost of converting all gasoline engines to hydrogen ones, the cost of the infrastructure (fuel stations, repair facilities, industry skillset retraining) changeover, etc.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Recycling old ideas is a great way to save brain energy. Thus I quote myself:
If you can maintain an air of hype-proofness it is fairly easy to see how stupid the "Hydrogen Economy" ideas are in both the short term and long term. Hydrogen is merely an energy carrier a finicky one at that. Many of its proponents only see the end result, a car that spits out warm wet air, without fully realizing the infrastructure that warm wet air is generated with.
Diesel, especially biodiesel has a much better cost/benefit analysis but isn't as sexy as technology as hydrogen. Even the word Diesel fares ill in comparison to the dynamicism of hydrogen's syllibles. It also seems to me that the American public, three quarters of which live in urban areas, connotate Diesel with dirty and noisy MAC trucks and pubtrans buses. If they're a little more technical they probably instantly think of Diesel cars like the TDI Golf and Jetta with their 90hp-I-think-I-can-make-it-up-to-passing-speed engines.
What Diesel hybrid proponents ought to do is start up a massive test drive program. Give a couple people the keys to a Diesel hybrid for a week with a full tank. If more people see they can actually use freeway on-ramps effectively AND have most of the tank of gas left by the end of the week they'd see Diesel hybrids and hopefully Diesel engines in a much different light. Electric assist makes a huge difference in the car's feel, especially for those who shun anything that won't pop off a light like a Roman candle.
The Honda Dualnote concept car is an excellent example of this idea, the combustion engine charges an ultracapacitor while idling or braking. Said capacitor gives an extra umph (100hp worth) when accelerating. If you were to stick such a system on a high efficiency yet power deprived car like the TDI Lupo it'd make for a fair bit of go juice without expending a ton of gas juice. Citroën and Audi have shown that it is possible to make exceptionally clean burning Diesels which is promising for the Diesel-smells-like-poo opponents. Nissan's Gloria is making some great advancements using toroidal CVTs instead of conventional gearboxs.
These sorts of advances lend well to designing a really badass Diesel hybrid. From conception to fruition Diesels are going to be far cheaper than any hydrogen powered car for the next several decades. Diesel fuel is much easier to store and transport than pure hydrogen, it is more robust than methanol, and with biodiesel is renewable and is only pumping the CO2 back into the environment that was used to grow it.
Hype about hydrogen based utopian societies are the same sort of pie in the sky crap that has been fed to people about fusion power. It's payoff point is always somewhere out in the distant future where we all use transporters to get to work. Hydrogen COULD be viable as could nuclear fusion. They could be viable technologies at a point in the future but not now and not any time soon. Hyping these technologies up does little to fix any problems anyone has in the here and now which is where we live.
Hydrogen will be a good idea some day but unfortunately not today. Until then we ought to work towards improving what we have available to its most efficient state while working on the technology of next year. I personally think Diesel's time is due but clean and efficient gasoline engines would work just as well for me. I just want more cars on the road with that get 40+ miles per gallon. I'd really love to see 90+ miles to the gallon. The more fuel efficient our cars get the less dependent we are on the gas pump to lead functional lives. Three times the gas milage means a third of your current fuel expenses. I'm sure everyone in meat space can find a use for a couple hundred extra dollars left at the end of the year, for some a few thousand.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
While the author of this article makes some excellent points, and a very convincing case, how about this instead: Stop importing oil immediately, Allow the price of domestic oil to roughly quintuple (or whatever the market does with it), and let private industry come up with solutions.
I hate to be the voice of techno-libertarianism here, but it seems like what the author is proposing involves putting all our eggs in one basket. I'd rather see a bunch of different people attack the problem from their own angles, and let the market decide which is the best solution.
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
For all the good that comes of weaning ourselves off of oil, there is a price, and it's one that isn't mentioned very often.
Take a look at where we get our oil from. I'm not talking in terms of politics or culture: I'm talking in terms of economics. For many of the oil-producing nations of the world, oil is the only natural resource they have. The influx of money to those nations has allowed great things to be done in some of these nations. It has, admittedly, also fueled some dictatorships, but even in these cases, the standard of living has risen somewhat.
Take away that inflow of cash, and you utterly decimate the economies of these nations. That's what people forget: it's not just the oil companies that benefit from oil. What do you intend to do when you've plunged some rather large nations back into the poverty that oil had finally allowed them to escape? What do you think they will do? Will terrorism decrease, as the groups see themselves as being finally left alone, or will it increase, in revenge for ruining their economies?
It's a delicate game, politics. Each decision leads to others, and has consequences far greater than can usually be seen at the time the decision is made. This is one of them.
I'm perfectly fine with a fuel-cel-powered vehicle. Sign me up. I'll buy one today...IF you can answer some VERY important questions for me:
When I'm 50 miles from the nearest re-hydrogenating station and I run out of hydrogen, how am I going to get more hydrogen? I can't really hitchhike into town and borrow a gas can now, can I? Would I have to wait for a hydrogen tanker to come fill me up? Or would it be cheaper just to call a tow truck?
At any rate, I can imagine that a "hydrogen can" might be a lot heavier than one of those red plastic gas cans...
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
The problem was that the hydrogen was enclosed in cloth impregnated with (essentially) .
rocket fuel.
What's more, even with the best insulation, as much as 4 percent of the liquid evaporates daily, creating pressure that can only be relieved by bleeding off the vapor. As a result, a car left at the airport for two weeks would lose half its fuel. Scientists need to find a way to eliminate or utilize this boil-off.
In the long run, automobile fuel cells themselves might be tied to the grid, making it possible for vehicles to feed power into the system rather than simply consume energy. That is, electrical meters might run backward some of the time. Futurist Amory Lovins envisions a peer-to-peer energy network in which spot power is distributed to users from the nearest source, be it a utility station or a station wagon.
It seems to me that the peer-to-peer grid idea could possibly take care of the car sitting for long periods of time - just burn off some of that extra energy to provide for a more immediate need and credit the energy back to you.
It still doesn't necessarily solve the problem of being "out of gas", but it sure seems more palatable.
"This is Shadow Traffic with your morning commute. We're leaving the Garden State Parkway and heading over to Lakehurst. It seems we've got a pile-up with some of them new hydrogen cars. Oh my god! It's burning up. The flames and the fire and, oh the humanity!"
"The Hindenberg just had a big Hydrogen balloon that wasn't being depleted"
It wasn't just a big bag of hydrogent, it was a big bag of hydrogen painted with solid rocket fuel.
Think about it: How else do you get a zeppelin to go up in a brilliant fireball when hydrogen burns clear?
Hydrogen is pie in the sky for now.
Instead, we should concentrate on a few other things first, which are immediately achievable, and ultimately more useful, in both the short and long term.
First, we need to get the sulfur out of diesel fuel. I'm taking this first because it's a no-brainer, and the current policy is too little, much too late. US standards for diesel are lower than Europe's, which is why we can't have their terrific, new-generation diesel cars. The average small car can, and does (over there) get 40+ mpg, without hybrid technology. Look at the Jetta Diesel -- it easily beats the Civic Hybrid, with no high-tech fancy stuff. The thing is, that's not even the best of the breed. Plus, if we get the sulfur out of the diesel, we can also clean up our industrial diesel engines considerably, which are the second biggest source of pollution in many areas.
Second, we do need that high-tech fancy stuff -- hybrid cars are terrific. Designs like the Insight/Civic are simply a better way to build a car, for a variety of reasons -- improved electrical systems, etc. The thing is, we need a better internal combustion motor to begin with -- and that's a new-generation diesel. A Civic Hybrid seems great at 45 mpg, but a hypothetical Jetta Diesel Hybrid would probably top 60 mpg. And if you must, SUVs with 40 mpg city, 30 mpg hwy are feasible too.
Third, we need to invest in smart power grids, and distributed power systems. This would allow to hook their solar systems, windmills, natural gas microturbines and fuel cells, and even hybrid cars into the grid, with the meter able to run backward. This would encourage development of clean power systems by eliminating the barrier to becoming a producer. It would drive down costs because of increased supply, and result in a more robust system. It's more efficient because it cuts transmision losses. Distributed power is better than a centralized model in a time of crisis -- what happens if someone bombs Hoover Dam, or other regional facility? Distributed power is better for national security. All it takes is some new switching gear and a computer network to control it all -- why are we not doing this?
Finally, we need to make our whole society more efficient by reducing car-dependent real estate development. It's ridiculous that people accept 50 mile commutes as normal. People should live, work, and shop within a very few miles. Unfortunately, lack of planning or lousy planning and zoning prevents this in many American cities The real solution to oil dependence is getting people out of their cars. Much has been written on this. Do a search on "new urbanism" if you wish.
So there you go -- clean diesel, diesel hybrid cars, and distributed power; plus land use, urban planning, and transportation reform. These are the solutions we have available to us *right now.* There are no huge technical problems to overcome. Hydrogen has huge technical considerations, and even bigger socio-political-economic ones. Sweeping revolution is fun to think about, but never works out in the real world. I say we take the baby steps first.
what do you think saudi arabia will do when we decide to go down this road? pump more oil maybe?? oil can be made so cheap that saudi arabia can kill of the hydrogen transition 'just for fun'. it will be worse that the transition to HDTV :)
when cars came along, they
bought all the train tracks (in LA), and guess
what? public transportation is barely functioning.
look around your neighborhood. how many gas stations do you see? what is the cost of this 'gas infrastructure'?
Perhaps you would care to do the calculation for us? Let's see: take your average daily home energy use (converted to BTU's) add in your average daily automotive use (you burn how many gallons per day?) converted to BTU's, add in the amount extra you want to have available to sell to power companies: that's your total daily energy requirements. Multiply by a factor of 3.5 to account for the inefficiency of solar conversion, then again by a factor of 1.5 to 5 (depending on the part of the country/climate you live in.) then once more by 2.5 (to account for the fact that the sun only shines usably for 40% of a day) to get your total solar requirements.
One more quick comnversion to square feet and you'll be able to tell me how many acres of solar panels this New York City apartment dweller will have to install to do his part.
Not a realistic solution, but it sure seems great for "buy one today" marketers.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Lets just modify some photosynthetic bacteria to exhale hydrogen! Just be sure it doesn't get loose into the oceans!
Entropy sucks.
Hydrogen requires energy to be made. The most convenient form of energy right now is still fossil fuels. Energy gets lost when converting it from one form to another (basic thermodynamics). We would be worse off if we tried to convert to hydrogen now. Solar energy is still a pipe dream, hydro power destroys once-pristine rivers, nuclear power is toxic. We are basically screwed without the development of fusion.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Why am I pessimistic? because as soon as a technology that promises to get away from petroleum dependency arises, petroleum producing states will cut prices significantly until said technology is deemed 'impractical'. Once this happens they'll raise prices once again.
I mean, how much does oil cost per barrel to Saudi Arabia to produce? a few bucks? less? how much are they selling it for? 30+ bucks and counting? They could flood the world oil market with oil at $5/barrel (which would translate in gas at around 40c/gallon) and still rack in profits...
Personally I don't believe that until oil runs out we'll ever wean ourselves from it: and given how big the reserves of oil producing states are, I don't believe it will run out for another several decades unfortunately...
just my 2c
-- the cake is a lie
Not necessarily. We just need massive amount of research for innovative techniques to store and transport hydrogen. Look at this Idea. Basically sodium hydride is pellitized and coated with polythene. Very stable, can be stored for months under water. Once the pellet is crushed, it reacts with water producing hydrogen instantly. No explosions, no pressurized tanks, no transportation problem and yes - no exploding cars. While this might not be a perfect solution, I am mentioning this to illustrate that there might be scores of innovative solutions to the problems of today. We just need the time, effort and money to look for it.
For sure, the H-economy will come from fossil resources, but the great advantage is location location. Most likely, h-fuel would be made from natural gas, which is much more abundant here at home, ie, both US and Canada have abundant stores.
The economics of pruducing h-fuel any other way are not likely to pan out for a very long time. Likely not until we have vastly superior technology all around.
Point in short, let's get over the hype, realize that we have been using a dirty H-fuel system for decades plus, and that nothing really dramatic will happen.
At least, not just from h-cars.
An H2 based economy will happen. There is absolutely no doubt about this. The general trend throughout history is to go from high carbon fuels to a zero-carbon fuel (wood -> coal -> oil -> gas -> H2). This transition will happen probably over the next 100 years. H2 will be piped into every home and used for both electrical energy (fuel cells) and heat (a furnace).
The most important thing to remember about H2 is that it is NOT an energy source, but an 'energy storage' system. An H2 tank is basically an chemical battery (all batteries are chemical, but you know what I mean). H2 allows energy to be generated in one location (wind-mills on the prairies) and moved to another location (a car manufacturer in Toronto). Currently, generated electrical energy (wind, hydro, etc.) must be consumed at the same time. By converting it into H2 it allows the energy to be stored.
The real question is not if it will happen, but how. There are two broad possibilities. One, the H2 will be distributed in a similar fashion as natural gas is today: Through pipelines that are controlled by state sanctioned monopolies (i.e. the Gas Company). There might be limited competition at the high volume end of things between large companies. These companies will control generation and distribution (and hence the price).
The second model is much more democratic. The pipelines will be owned by the public (like most roads are today) and the mechanism of transmission will be operated by some body (public or otherwise); that is, they'll look after the physical infrastructure. Here's the kicker: the generation and sale of H2 will be open to anybody. Most people will still choose just to buy the H2 at the market price, but people will also be able to store H2 if they want. They will be able to purchase the H2 when the price is low (night), store it in tanks, and sell when the price is high (day). Very complex computer programs will be written to try maximize their profits. Furthermore, people with small wind-mills or solar cells will be able to sell the extra energy that they do not consume by generating H2 and selling it on the open market. Farmers on the prairies will be able to build windmills to generate H2 and supplement their incomes. In this model, the free market is in driving force for the price of H2, not monopolies.
It is important to understand what is happening with H2 based economies because it is up to the people to ensure that the second model happens. Big oil/gas companies will oppose it every step of the way and try to maintain control. It will be interesting to see what happens.
-PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
Obviously this article was bought and paid for by the global hydrogen cartels, in a conspiracy to suppress the true energy source of the future: pure, clean antimatter!
All we need is a $100 trillion/year subsidy to develop antimatter-resistant materials and technology for producing antimatter from medical waste and discarded athletic shoes.
A distribution network would not be necessary because your car could run for 75 BILLION miles on a single kilogram of antimatter, which has four billion times the energy density of gasoline and SIXTEEN BILLION times the energy density of chemical hydrogen.
Oh no they're breaking down the doKJY(W*#&^
Other than putting a nuclear reactor in my car, or electrifying all of our highways like bumper cars, or some not-invented-yet super-battery, what do you have in mind as a more efficient delivery vehicle for getting electricity into my car?
The only way to evaluate is to look at the fuel cycle. Biodiesel offers the best, most direct fuel cycle. You grow it, you harvest it, you turn it into oil using a press. You mix it up with some ethanol and you got biodiesel from nothing more than grain alcohol and veggie oil. Then, you burn it... its cleaner than gas, biodegradable, yada, yada. That plus the fact that you're growing it helps clean the air. Plany soybeans near the highway... or in the middle of it. Oh, and it doesn't cost trillion of dollars either. Its already available at public pumps. And I can actually buy a car with performance that burns it for the same price. Oh, and I can find somebody that can fix it too. If it breaks down.
Okay, I've looked at a number of studies I googled over the past half hour or something--and though there was lots of studies of biomass usage, endorsing its energy efficiency and effects on CO2 levels, but what the studies don't give me a warm fuzzy feeling on is How much food production capability would be displaced by biodiesel, ethanol whatever if we tried to switch to a mostly biomass economy. The waste oil from French fries (er...I guess The Man wants me to call them Freedom Fries now or something) only takes us so far--if you want to do biodiesel as The Solution To Our Energy Problem are we all going to have to go on a serious diet or what?
Currently, the least expensive method is a process known as steam reforming, in which natural gas reacts chemically with steam to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Far preferable would be to use carbon-free resources like solar, wind, and hydropower to produce electricity for electrolysis, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen would make renewable energy practical, acting as a storage medium for the modest amounts of energy such resources produce. Wind power, especially, lends itself to this sort of use.
And there's the rub. Even neglecting the astronomical capital costs, no one has concieved a renewable energy program that will fulfill our energy needs. Most hydrogen will have to be produced from natural gas. The rest will have to be produced using electricty generated by nuclear, fossil fuel, and hydroelectric plants. No renewable technology has yet been proposed that could possibly generate enough power to do this a bearable cost. Hence, our dependance on foreign oil remains.
Hydrogen requires alot of energy to be produced, and most of that energy will come from coal. I know this has been mentioned, and this MIT study has been mentioned, but here is a link to a more readable news story
People go on and on about the hydrogen future, but it's a mere distraction. Hydrogen will not replace oil, or coal, or gas. It may replace gasoline. Because hydrogen is an intermediate energy form - it's temporary storage between production/harvesting of energy and use of energy. And for all its supposed advantages, it's got a lot of faults. IMHO, diesel/biodiesel is a much more flexible and practical intermediate fuel - and if anyone could come up with a better battery, it would beat both.
The real question is energy generation/production/harvesting. We need to stop shipping in oil and burning up coal and start harvesting it from renewable (AKA "effectively infinite") sources, particularly the ones with low environmental impact. That means solar, wind, microhydro, biodiesel, cellulositic ethanol, tidal and current turbines, and geothermal. We need on-site off-grid power generation. We need to distribute energy generation and storages so that we don't need delicate, wasteful shipping methods - be they the power grid or fuel trucks. And we need to stop letting everyone get away with building structures and devices that waste energy with wild abandon.
Long story short - hydrogen may have potential, but it's being sold like snake oil and it's years away from reality. If we focused on simpler, proven technologies and put some real effort into some rather obvious fields of research (like high efficiency solar) we could have a working system in much shorter order.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
What's with the fixation on minimalist atomic structures? Your puny electron and single proton are no match for my Plutonium based economy! Not only can I generate power so cheaply that it's not worth measuring, but can blow us both to bits if anybody messes with it!
Well, I guess a hydrogen based economy is better than an information based one. Just be prepared to pay the inventor of cheap, plentiful hydrogen the same or more than you're paying for oil, even if it is nearly zero cost to produce, if our experience with the info biz is any example to go by. If someone can get filthy rich off pc software, imagine what this future hydrogen baron is going to make off something we really need like personal transportation!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Then we can take the "waste product" and sell it to Saudia Arabia.
When VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws have VPNs.
Here
http://www.geomar.de/sci_dpmt/umwelt/gas_hydr/
also look at google.
" Formed under conditions of high pressure and low temperature, the gas hydrates slowly decompose when brought to the surface releasing methane gas and water. As an impressive demonstration of their natural gas content, these snow-white 'icecubes' are flamable. "
Unfortunately the small amount of extra power from their solar cells isn't going to be enough to generate an appeciable amount of fuel hydrogen...
Thats problem with adopting hydrogen as fuel--it takes too much energy to create it from water.
The only reason that this is a problem though is because the people looking at it aren't looking at it right. You see, instead of spending billions of dollars trying to reduce the cost of the hydrogen production process, we SHOULD be concentrating on what we already know how to do--simply reduce the cost of the large amounts of power needed in the process.
What's the best way to reduce the cost of electricity you ask? Simple. Harness the power of the atom. The trouble is, while a nuclear power plant is a clean and very powerful energy source when kept within safety guidelines, there are many environmentalists out there who fear the very minute possibility of a nuclear accident (of which only one of any real severity has ever happened, due entirely to the stupidity of the people who built and ran it).
But now we come to another problem; while one VERY good reason for adopting hydrogen power is self-sufficency, hydrogen power is also strongly supported by environmentalists. These very people who support hydrogen power in the interest of helping keep the environment clean are in essence kicking themselves in the face by opposing nuclear power, which is the simplest, cleanest way to produce bulk energy (which not only can make hydrogen power more feasible, thus reducing or eliminating oil dependency, but also by eliminating coal and gas dependency by making older power plants unneccessary).
The moral of the story? Nuclear power can solve all of our fossil fuel problems if only people will give it a real chance.
Peter Schwartz neglects to mention something that is perhaps not immediately obvious - hydrogen is currently produced from petroleum. It is going to be extremely, extremely difficult to transition to a hydrogen economy while leaving petroleum behind. To do this is going to require a major advance in science - namely the development of an inorganic system for splitting water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. There have been many great minds working on this for years and currently the record for doing this is around 1% at best (based on the conversion of hydrogen from a single photon).
Clearly, a hydrogen economy devoid of an intimate connecting with fossil fuels is not going to be a reality any time in the near future.
The first way to begin easing the dependency on petroleum is to both decrease consumption and increase the efficiency of processes that consume energy. The first of these is obviously not a simple task. The second is. John Deutch (MIT) has argued that if all cars in the US were hybrid, we would reduce the daily consumption of petroleum by approximately 30% (I recall it would be around 3 million barrels/day vs 30 million). And this is just the start - think about all of the other technologies that could be improved by improving efficiency.
My point is not to shoot down the article, but simply to note that the switch to a hydrogen economy is absolutely going to be connected to petroleum - there is currently no other way to produce hydrogen as efficiently (currently steam reforming hovers around 60-80% in terms of the yield).
This is correct, if we switch all teh internal combustion engines over to hydrogen, we'll still need energy to produce the hydrogen. And yes, at first a lot of that hydrogen might be produced by burning or refining petroleum fuel at plants and then shipping the hydrogen to refueling stations.
This does not mean that hydrogen is useless, or that we should deveop ethanol or methanol vehicles instead, or any of the other alternatives suggested.
Hydrogen is the simplest form in the series of energy carries we've been progressing along. We started out with wood, then moved to coal, then petroleum. Each of those is a hydrocarbon, and as we've progressed up the chain there's been more and more hydrogen and less and less carbon. Each step is more efficient at storing energy than the last, and hydrogen is that last step we can take before moving on to something complety different.
Although we can't find it naturally, hydrogen is relatively easy to produce given another source of energy, and as stated, it's very efficient at storing the energy you put into it. This means that hydrogen makes an ideal energy currency.
A long time ago, before there was money, people used barter to get what they needed. You might trade 1 goat for ten chickens. Some cultures eventually devolped a pseudo-currency where everything would be equated to a certain number of one thing, everything had a certain value in chickens for example. After awhile, minted currency was developed that turned this idea into an abstract form. The money was artifically produced and assigned a certain value, and by using this abstract currency people didn't have to carry chickens around anymore.
Petroleum is a pseudo-currency, like a chicken. We've all agreed that (for the most part) petroleum is the standard, and that's what we use to run our internal combustion engines. You can't toss a couple of logs in your gas tank and have your car work, and most cars aren't happy with having methanol poured in them without some adaptions being made.
Hydrogen actually carries the energy with it, which in some senses makes it a pseudo-currency, but the fact that it can be artifically produced using other sources of energy makes it more like a real currency in my opinion, which makes it very similar to electricity.
No one is particulary concerned that if we run out of coal our computers will stop working because there would be no more electricity. We'd build more hydropower plants and more nuclear power plants, and more people would install solar cells on their houses. There might be a period of changeover, but because electricity is an energy currency we'd be able to adapt quickly. If all of the sudden we ran out of oil however, most people are convinced (with good reason) that it would be a disaster)
However if all inernal combustion engines used hydrogen, another energy currency, then we could handle the issue in the same manner as a lack of coal. Other production methods would ramp up to meed the increased demand, and after a period of minor difficulty, everything would be back to normal.
Similarly, no one worries that if fusion power is developed into a workable form that their TV won't be compatible with it anymore. The electric grid is designed so that any source of power can be hooked in. Likewise, your car wouldn't care where the hydrogen came from. If you want to be extra green and produce your own hydrogen using methanol so you don't have to worry about the enviromental effects of petroleum being used, go ahead, your car won't notice.
Along with this increased versatility the centralized production would bring with it imporved efficiency. Petroleum based internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient, and efforts at improving fuel efficiency have only begun to address that. If the petroleum currently being used at cars was instead being refined into hydrogen at centralized plants, not only could more efficient methods of generating power be used at the refinery, but it would be much easier to deal with the polution at a single point source.
The most important point of hydrogen is the freedom it gives us from a single source of energy. Using hydrogen doesn't mean that we would necessarily stop using petroleum, but it would mean that we _could,_ and to some extent we wouldn't have to deal as much with the messiness inherent in petroleum internal combustion engines. Just like the existance of currency doesn't meant that you have to give up owning chickens, but it does mean that you can if you want, and you don't need to carry them with you when you go to the store anymore.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Yes contaminents kill off the micro-organisms in wastewater, but that isn't really news to anyone- most modern industrialized nations have been treating waste water for a very long time. It's a very simple process, and in the end if its done right you will be pumping nearly pure water back into a water source like a river. The left over sludge is sold to farmers typically who use it as a fertilizer, some sludge is also kept just in case a contaminant does get into to the system, so you can restart your waste water plant.
Terrorism is a last-ditch attempt to gain the attention of powers that don't/can't/won't pay attention to the social effects of their policies.
It's because the US has fucked about with the economies and societies of Middle-East nations, and is continuing to do so, all to secure their supply of oil, that terrorism against the US came about.
By your logic, terrorists should be attacking the Swiss, the Norwegians, the New Zealanders, and the Mongolians, all because they're different.
You must understand: terrorism is a political tool, not a religious one. Wars are religious, and the impending one is no different.
I had one, but the wheel fell off.
I don't have the numbers with me but it wasn't hard to show that it takes a lot of wind to generate a single GGE (gallon of gasoline equivalent) of hydrogen. However, considering the vast subsidies we pay for oil (not even counting military and environmental expenses), it seems clear that there is a lot of money to be made.
Regarding the "chicken and egg" problem of "who wants to buy a hydrogen car if there are no hydrogen stations" and "who wants to build hydrogen stations if there are no hydrogen cars", a strategy had occurred to me. Begin the program by providing energy to businesses and cities to run stuff other than cars. There's no reason you couldn't use hydrogen to generate the electricity used in a factory or city water plant. From the brief economic analysis I did it looked feasible to locate fuel cells at the desination (where the electricity is needed) and deliver & store the hydrogen there.
The customer could remain on the power grid to provide backup power in case there was a hydrogen deliver problem (it's new so there will be problems. If they have excess generating capacity there's no reason they couldn't sell power back into the grid.
Using hydrogen in this way would reduce the company's or city's pollution output and might make them eligible for pollution credits (if the US ever decides to join the Kyoto Protocol or something similar).
Selling hydrogen to individual customers with large demand and few & fixed locations would provide a simpler business model as hydrogen production is getting started. As such producers/distributors proliferate, setting up H2-gas stations will be more feasible.
If we don't do it soon in the US then Europe or someone else will do it first and we'll miss out on the economic advantages of controlling market direction.
Another DOE page
Nice round numbers, all multiples of $5 billion, and all numbers that are well short of anything resembling a reasonable amount to start making a dent in the current system.
I googled up this recent article that says OPEC is producing 24.5 million barrels of oil a day. At $40 a barrel, that's $980 million a day spent on oil around the world. Let's say we take a quarter of that into the US (it's more, iirc). That's a quarter billion a day in oil alone, without touching infrastructure, etc.
$100 billion is going to "... shift the balance of power from foreign oil producers to US energy consumers within a decade"?? Forget it. "The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling"?? Get the ball rolling? The authors of this article want station owners to install something for which there's zero consumer demand -- and then only have the government subsidize enough to get the ball rolling?
How much is the government going to pay to give everyone a car that uses this new fuel? And once everyone's driving, what is the government going to do about all the other products that use petroleum? Cars in driveways are just the beginning, and filling stations aren't even that.
These numbers might sound big to us individually, but taken in context they are a drop in the bucket. If switching from oil to hydrogen was that easy, we'd've done it long ago.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.